Air Force, Boeing Trying to Tackle Tanker Challenges

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  17 septembre 2018 | International, C4ISR

  Silicon Valley should work with the military on AI. Here’s why.

  By Editorial Board GOOGLE DECIDED after an employee backlash this summer that it no longer wanted to help the U.S. military craft artificial intelligence to help analyze drone footage. Now, the military is inviting companies and researchers across the country to become more involved in machine learning. The firms should accept the invitation. The Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will invest up to $2 billion over the next five years in artificial intelligence, a significant increase for the bureau whose goal is promoting innovative research. The influx suggests the United States is preparing to start sprinting in an arms race against China. It gives companies and researchers who want to see a safer world an opportunity not only to contribute to national security but also to ensure a more ethical future for AI. The DARPA contracts will focus on helping machines operate in complex real-world scenarios. They will also tackle one of the central conundrums in AI: something insiders like to call “explainability.” Right now, what motivates the results that algorithms return and the decisions they make is something of a black box. That's worrying enough when it comes to policing posts on a social media site, but it is far scarier when lives are at stake. Military commanders are more likely to trust artificial intelligence if they know what it is “thinking,” and the better any of us understands technology, the more responsibly we can use it. There is a strong defense imperative to make AI the best it can be, whether to deter other countries from using their own machine-learning capabilities to target the United States, or to ensure the United States can effectively counter them when they do. Smarter technologies, such as improved target recognition, can save civilian lives, and allowing machines to perform some tasks instead of humans can protect service members. But patriotism is not the only reason companies should want to participate. They know better than most in government the potential these technologies have to help and to harm, and they can leverage that knowledge to maximize the former and minimize the latter. Because DARPA contracts are public, the work researchers do will be transparent in a way that Project Maven, the program that caused so much controversy at Google, was not. Employees aware of what their companies are working on can exert influence over how those innovations are used, and the public can chime in as well. DARPA contractors will probably develop products with nonlethal applications, like improved self-driving cars for convoys and autopilot programs for aircraft. But the killer robots that have many people worried are not outside the realm of technological possibility. The future of AI will require outlining principles that explain how what is possible may differ from what is right. If the best minds refuse to contribute, worse ones will. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/silicon-valley-should-work-with-the-military-on-ai-heres-why/2018/09/12/1085caee-b534-11e8-a7b5-adaaa5b2a57f_story.html

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  7 décembre 2018 | International, C4ISR

  Is near-instant satellite imagery almost here?

  By: Mike Gruss Intelligence analysts and soldiers on the battlefield could have access to near real-time imagery from commercial satellites as soon as 2021 thanks to new industry partnerships. Amazon Web Services unveiled Nov. 28 a new product named AWS Ground Station, which includes parabolic antennas at 12 locations across the globe. Those ground stations can download imagery data as satellites pass overhead and then push that information to the cloud at faster speeds than traditional ground stations. Meanwhile, leaders from satellite imagery company DigitalGlobe said in tests they were able to move imagery data from the ground station to the cloud in less than a minute. Using today's technology, that task takes about an hour. Combined, the speed of the new ground stations and the expected launch of DigitalGlobe's constellation of next-generation imagery satellites in 2021 would offer a new level of immediacy to customers. “When firefighters are attacking a wildfire, they need the most up-to-date information to save lives and homes,” Jeff Carr, director of mission operations engineering support at DigitalGlobe, wrote in a Nov. 27 blog post. “When first responders are tracking down refugees fleeing danger in flimsy rubber boats, they need real-time information about where those rubber boats are located before they sink. The uses for current and accurate space-based data is growing — and the end-users need it quickly.” DigitalGlobe provides imagery to the National Reconnaissance Office under the Enhanced View contract and to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency with the Global EGD contract. Several companies that already provide imagery and data to the Department of Defense and intelligence community — including BlackSky, Spire and HawkEye 360 — are also using the ground stations. Traditionally, ground stations download information from satellites on a rigid schedule, meaning users must wait several hours until the next pass when new information is available and can be processed. The company's new Legion satellites will double the number of times the satellites contact ground stations. In addition, an imagery satellite could revisit the same target as many as 15 times a day. All of that means defense and intelligence agencies could have access to imagery that is a few minutes old, not several hours old. Turner Brinton, a DigitalGlobe spokesman, declined to comment on the technical aspects of how the company would support the U.S. government. “Satellite data is incredibly useful for building a wide range of important applications, but it is super complex and expensive to build and operate the infrastructure needed to do so,” Charlie Bell, senior vice president of AWS, said in a press release. “Today, we are giving satellite customers the ability to dynamically scale their ground station antenna use based on actual need. And, they will be able to ingest data straight into AWS, where they can securely store, analyze and transmit products to their customers without needing to worry about building all of the infrastructure themselves.” In addition, Lockheed Martin and Amazon Web Services announced a new partnership Nov. 27 that would allow customers to download satellite data faster, more often and from multiple satellites at the same time. That technology is a shoebox-sized antenna and satellite receiver known as Verge. Each antenna would cost about $20,000 and replace larger parabolic antennas, which are often priced at more than $1 million. While Pentagon officials have worried that larger ground stations for military satellite could make easy targets, the relatively small size of Verge could be an attractive feature to defense officials focused on resiliency. It's unlikely the Defense Department would rely on the new technology for its satellite downlinks, but Lockheed Martin leaders said they could envision the military would use the ground stations for experimental satellites, particularly those in low-Earth orbit. Or the technology could be used to create a backup ground station for some of the Pentagon's more sophisticated satellites. Already, Lockheed Martin has tested a network of 10 S-band antennas in the Denver area that downlinked from a small satellite from the Air Force Research Laboratory, said Rick Ambrose, Lockheed Martin's executive vice president for space. In addition, the company has also downlinked data from another, unspecified government satellite and sent that data to the agency's cloud. https://www.c4isrnet.com/intel-geoint/2018/12/03/is-near-instant-satellite-imagery-in-the-near-future

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  3 février 2021 | International, C4ISR

  With Deepwave Digital, Northrop Grumman is pushing processing to the edge

  Nathan Strout WASHINGTON — Northrop Grumman says a new investment into small startup Deepwave Digital will allow it to push data processing much closer to the point of collection, decreasing the amount of data that needs to be transported and getting products to war fighters faster. Northrop Grumman will install Deepwave Digital's artificial intelligence solution on airborne and on orbit payloads, said Chris Daughters, the company's vice president of research, technology and engineering for aeronautics systems. With the AI incorporated into the payload, the satellite or aircraft will no longer need to send data back to the ground to be processed. Instead, the payload will process the data itself. The innovation, said Daughters, is in incorporating the AI software with the hardware used in various Northrop Grumman payloads. “Deepwave Digital really has an innovative architecture that blends artificial intelligence with some advanced hardware in the RF [radio frequency] domain, whereas a lot of artificial intelligence in the past has always been focused on, I'll just say, mining and scrubbing really big data or maybe doing customized things with video or audio,” said Daughters. In other words, the AI is able to process data at the edge, at the point of collection, instead of sending it down to Earth to be processed independently. “We have a lot of RF payload systems that collect information or collect intelligence for the war fighters and the government as a whole, and by embedding this innovative hardware and AI software, we are able to essentially filter and optimize and scrub and prioritize the data much nearer to the point of collection for that information,” said Daughters. AI has been key to the military's efforts to manage the torrent of data collected by government and commercial satellites, which is simply too much for human analysts to sort through on their own. While progress has been made in using AI to process satellite imagery, military officials are now tackling a related problem: the sheer amount of raw data being pushed out over the networks for processing at remote locations. To reduce the bandwidth needed for satellite imagery, U.S. Army officials say the military needs to shift to edge processing, meaning applying AI to the data and then sending the finished product out over the network instead of all of the raw data. “Edge processing is something that we're very interested in for a number of reasons. And what I mean by that is having smart sensors that can not only detect the enemy, [but] identify, characterize and locate, and do all those tasks at the sensor processing,” said John Strycula, director of the Army's task force focused on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, at an October AUSA event. “If I only have to send back a simple message from the sensor that says the target is here ― here's the location and here's what I saw and here's my percent confidence ― versus sending back the whole image across the network, it reduces those bandwidth requirements,” he added. Daughters said Northrop Grumman is working to incorporate Deepwave Digital's AI solution into products in development or in limited production in the “very near term.” “The capability exists now. We just need to integrate it in with the systems,” said Daughters. “Our research and technology organization is already looking at how we could be injecting this hardware and AI capability in some of the systems that exist right now or very near term.” While the company is applying the AI to both space and airborne systems, the technology can be more easily integrated with airborne systems, where payloads can be more easily accessed or swapped out. https://www.c4isrnet.com/intel-geoint/2021/02/02/with-deepwave-digital-northrop-grumman-is-pushing-processing-to-the-edge/